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Karen Burns of Matawan, N.J. spent 24 years as a dental assistant, but now she gets chelation treatments to cleanse her body of toxic mercury, which she says has left her sick and disabled for 15 years.
Courtesy: Randall Moore, director/producer of the documentary Evidence of Harm

An employee of Mercury Instruments USA, Inc. uses a device that measures how many mercury atoms are in the air at an industrial site, based on their atomic weight. The device, known as a Cold Vapor Atomic Absorption Spectrophometer, takes such precise real-time readings that it "is accepted by the scientific community as the industry standard," said Alex Hummell, the chief executive of the Littleton, Colo.-based firm.
Courtesy of Mercury InstrumentsCourtesy of Mercury Instruments

Karen Burns of Matawan, N.J., shown here in 2012 in front of her sister's house in Staten Island, N.Y., blames an array of illnesses on exposure to mercury during 24 years as a dental assistant. She says she's been stricken with chronic fatigue syndrome, the painful muscle syndrome fibromyalgia and seemingly constant flu-like symptoms that have left her disabled and unable to carry on a normal life for the last 15 years.
Courtesy of Randall MooreCourtesy of Randall Moore

Alex Hummell, chief executive officer for Littleton, Co.-based Mercury Instruments, USA, shown in 2012, says dentists, their patients and their staffs are often exposed to mercury levels two to three times the average workday limit allowed by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but get little scrutiny. In tests during drilling to remove a mercury filling from a tooth placed in a mannequin, Hummell said, mercury levels in the breathing zones of the dentist and patient zoomed as high as 30 times the permissible exposure limit.
Courtesy of Randall MooreCourtesy of Randall Moore

Alex Hummell says few dentists seem worried enough about invisible, odorless mercury to take the kinds of precautions needed to prevent everyday exposures.

As the head of a Littleton, Colorado, firm that sells sophisticated equipment to gauge airborne levels of highly toxic mercury at industrial sites worldwide, Hummell has watched manufacturers of all sorts put their employees through strict training programs in which they don special equipment to avoid even tiny exposures.

Then he walks into dental clinics and is dumbfounded.

On numerous occasions, he said, he has detected mercury levels in dental offices that were two to three times the average workday exposure limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but patients and the staff were wearing little or no protective equipment.

“I’ve seen in dental offices what would make these other offices have to shut down,” said Hummell, CEO of Mercury Instruments USA Inc. “They would be closing their doors and getting respirators on.”

Instead, he said, “there are kids running around everywhere. It’s nuts. It’s the exact same toxin, and it’s being treated totally differently. Why is it being allowed to be so unregulated?”

OSHA requires dentists with one or more employees, like any other employer, to ensure their offices are free from “recognized hazards . . . likely to cause death or serious injury.”

Dentists must provide employees with annual training and a list of all chemical agents stored in their offices, as well as a copy of manufacturers’ Material Safety Data Sheets, which spell out the health risks of mercury, which comprises 50 percent of dental amalgams.

Hummell said his other customers monitor mercury levels at their work sites, as required by the government, but few dentists seem to be doing so.

I have five kids. I won’t bring them to just any dental office. Mercury being one of the most toxic elements on the planet . . . I wouldn’t want my kids to be around it for even a second. Alex Hummel, CEO of Mercury Instruments USA Inc.

Mercury exposure, experts say, reaches the worst levels when old mercury fillings are drilled out, sending toxic particles flying in the breathing zones of patients, dentists and their aides. Many dentists use high-speed vacuums to suction most of the debris away from patients.

To see how high mercury exposures in dental offices could get, Hummell said he performed a two-day experiment at the office of Joe Palmer, a mercury-free dentist in Greenville, South Carolina, a few years ago. During drilling to remove a mercury filling in the mouth of a mannequin, he measured mercury levels as much as 30 times the OSHA limit.

“That’s drilling ‘high and dry,’ as they call it” – drilling out the filling and removing mercury particles with a high-speed suctioning device, Hummell said.

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In the offices of North Carolina dentist Matthew Young, retired Chairman Boyd Haley of the University of Kentucky’s chemistry department assists in demonstrating how much mercury is released during drilling to remove a mercury filling from a tooth placed in a mannequin. Unlike in many dental offices, the experiment did not use a high-speed vacuum to suction waste from a patient's mouth. This is a scenario that happens everyday in dental schools and some dental offices.

Courtesy of Randall Moore, director/producer of the documentary Evidence of Harm

Several years ago, Hummell said, he set up a booth at a regional dental conference in Denver to demonstrate how his equipment could pick up rising mercury levels with a mere gentle brushing of a filling in an old tooth.

He said he also showed dentists an American Dental Association pamphlet urging them to periodically monitor their offices for mercury, a circular that mostly drew chuckles and ridicule from the dentists.

“I got a call the day after the convention from the American Dental Association’s lawyer threatening to take me down if I didn’t stop using their publication,” Hummell said. “I said, ‘I thought the dental association wanted them to know.’”

“Right after that, you couldn’t find that publication anywhere. . . . It disappeared from the Internet.”